‹
RESEARCH
›

CATEGORIES

LEARN MORE

‹
VENTUREBEAT
›

Bay Area still center for search technology

Matt MarshallMarch 4, 2005 10:00 AM

Many in Silicon Valley are worried silly about the supposed exodus of high-tech jobs to India and China, but the stream of tech companies coming this way shouldn’t be ignored. The latest is search company YourAmigo, which tells VentureWire (sorry, sub required) that it’s moving its headquarters to Silicon Valley from Adelaide, Australia. Just two weeks ago, the Korean founders of MySimon unveiled Become.com, a company they formed locally after returning last year — saying the U.S. market is still the most lucrative, that Silicon Valley is the best place to hire, and, oh yes, raise moolah. Become.com’s CEO Michael Yang told us he’s looking to raise a VC round of about $12 million. Meanwhile, the five-year-old YourAmigo apparently has gotten $4 million from Silicon Valley’s BA Venture Partners and is looking for one more investor to close its $8 million first round of institutional funding, according to VentureWire.

According to CEO Rahmon Coupe:

The new centerpiece of YourAmigo’s technology converts the dynamic Web pages that the company used to search into a format that allows search engines like Yahoo and Google to read them.

“Given that we had the core technology to search the invisible Web, we thought we could help Web sites get crawled and provide a bridge between Web sites and Google,” said Coupe. “Search on the Internet is already important and attracting significant advertising dollars, but its going to be really, really important in the future.”